Chattering classes here in the U.S. have recently been absorbed in discussions that dance around, but never quite address, a question that cuts to the heart of how we think about the basic architecture of reality: are human beings purely material, or something more?
The first skirmish broke out when a major breast-cancer charity, Susan Komen for the Cure (the folks responsible for the ubiquitous pink ribbons), decided to cut their grants to Planned Parenthood, a decision they quickly reversed after facing an enormous public backlash. Planned Parenthood provides a wide variety of women’s health services, including birth control and screening for breast cancer, but is widely associated with abortion services. The Komen leaders offered numerous (mutually contradictory) reasons for their original action, but there is no doubt that their true motive was to end support to a major abortion provider, even if their grants weren’t being used to fund abortions.
Abortion, of course, is a perennial political hot potato, but the other recent kerfuffle focuses on a seemingly less contentious issue: birth control. Catholics, who officially are opposed to birth control of any sort, objected to rules promulgated by the Obama administration, under which birth control would have to be covered by employer-sponsored insurance plans. The original objection seemed to be that Catholic hospitals and other Church-sponsored institutions would essentially be paying for something they though was immoral, in response to which a work-around compromise was quickly adopted. This didn’t satisfy everyone (anyone?), however, and now the ground has shifted to an argument that no individual Catholic employer should be forced to pay for birth-control insurance, whether or not the organization is sponsored by the Church. This position has been staked out by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and underlies a new bill proposed by Florida Senator Mark Rubio.
Topics like this are never simple, but they can be especially challenging for a secular democracy. On the one hand, our society is based on religious pluralism. We have freedom of conscience, and try to formulate our laws in such a way that everyone’s rights are protected. But on the other hand, people have incompatible beliefs about fundamental issues. Such beliefs are often of central importance, and the duct tape of political liberalism isn’t always sufficient to hold things together.
When it comes to abortion and birth control, there’s no question that down-and-dirty political and social aspects are front and center. Different political parties want to score points with their constituencies by standing firm in the current culture wars. And there’s also no question that restricting access to contraception and abortion is driven in part (we can argue about how big that part is) by a desire to control women’s sexuality.
But there is also a serious question about human life and the nature of reality. What actually happens when that sperm and ovum get together to make a zygote? Is it just one step of many in an enormously complex chemical reaction that ultimately gives rise to a new person, who is at heart just a complex chemical reaction him-or-herself? Or is it the moment when an immaterial soul, distinct from the material body, first comes into being? Question like this matter — but as a society we hardly ever discuss them, at least not in any serious and open way. As a result, different sides talk past each other, trying to squeeze metaphysical stances into political boxes.
If it were really true that “a human life” was defined by the association of an immaterial soul with a physical body, and that association began at the moment of conception, then making abortion illegal would be perfectly sensible. It would be murder, pure and simple. (Very few people are actually consistent here, believing that mothers who have abortions should be treated like someone who has committed murder; but there are some.) But this view of reality is not true.
Naturalism, which describes human beings in the same physical terms as other objects in the universe, doesn’t actually provide a cut-and-dried answer to the abortion question, because it doesn’t draw a bright line between “a separate living person” and “a collection of cells.” But it provides an utterly different context for addressing the question. Naturalists are generally against murder, but it’s because they recognize certain collections of atoms as “people,” and endow those people with rights and privileges as part of the structure of society. It all comes from distinctions that we human beings ultimately invent, not ones that are handed down from a higher authority. Consequently, the appropriate rules are less clear. A naturalist wants to know whether the purported person can think, feel, react, and so on. They also will balance the interests of the fetus, whatever they may be, against the interests of the mother, who is unquestionably a living and functioning person. It’s perfectly natural that those interests will seem more important than those of a fetus that isn’t even viable outside the womb.
Most everyone, religious believers and naturalists alike, agrees that killing innocent one-year-old children is morally wrong. Consequently, we can happily live together in a society where that kind of action is illegal. But our beliefs about aborting one-month-old embryos are understandably very different. The disagreements about these issues aren’t simply political, they run much deeper than that.
It matters how people think about the world. Political liberalism is a good system, but it only works insofar as the citizens can agree on a core set of values and push cultural/religious differences to the periphery. Naturalism doesn’t answer all the value-oriented questions we might have; it simply provides a sensible framework in which they can be profitably discussed. But between naturalists and non-naturalists, profitable discussion is much more difficult. Which is why we naturalists have to keep pressing, making the best case we can, trying to convince as many people as we can reach that there is only one realm of existence, governed by unbreakable laws, and that we are part of it.
Pavonis on property dualism in 38:
“So I think there is something “more” there (but not some magical material which has never been detected!).”
The experiential aspect or property (the experience of red) of physical processes (brain events) is of course not available to observation, only the physical processes themselves. Such properties can’t figure in scientific explanations of behavior, since science only deals in observables, like brains and bodies. In which case, consciousness qua the “experiential aspect” can’t play a causal role in explaining behavior. Whatever the “more” of consciousness is, it doesn’t add to what the brain accomplishes in behavior control, http://www.naturalism.org/privacy.htm
oops make that Pavonis on property dualism in #43
Btw, re: “… it is pretty clear that consciousness only exists within brains, not zygotes. So I would draw the cut-off for legality of abortion at the development of capacity for consciousness as a marker for ‘ensoulment’.”
Consciousness, for instance the capacity for suffering, seems to be a system property dependent on certain sorts of fairly complex neural processing. But maintaining the existence of consciousness per se whenever it’s deemed to come into being (and there may be no clear line separating conscious and non-conscious fetuses) still wouldn’t necessarily trump the interests of the potential mother.
Nature performs a lot of murders, but these are not taken into account in these heated debates. Nature has a good metric system and determines the viability of an embryo soon after conception. Most miscarriages occur in the first 12 weeks post conception, and most are even un-noticed by the woman. Only sometimes months later would she recall uncomfortable feeling or slight bleeding to suggest miscarriage. I think that the most natural thing about nature is its nature to make errors, which in consequence leads to mutations and consequently evolution. Exactly this particular property of nature leads to some ‘errors’, in which nonviable embryos survive the entire pregnancy. Sometimes nature is not wrong, and the embryo can be ‘compatible’ with life, even if that is only ten seconds, because if time were the measure of viability all humans are not compatible with life because we die within 100 years of conception which is <<<<compared to the age of the universe.
Or in other words, to those who say shame on us for not admitting souls as a plausible mechanism with any explanatory value, shame on you for not believing in pink unicorns – with magical powers, that is. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were pink unicorns somewhere in the multiverse.
Let’s suppose there are souls, though. By souls I mean persona which are somehow created in or downloaded into collections of cells around the time of conception, and which are then uploaded into some cosmic server at death. Sounds silly to me, but to each his or her own. In that case, what would be the problem with abortion? It can’t kill an eternal soul once one has formed, can it? No harm, no foul.
@GM: I see where you’re coming from on the rest of your arguments and while I don’t entirely agree with you, I can at least see your points and admit that they’re perfectly valid. The God/Science thing is the only place I have any serious disagreement with you. And no, I’m not going to attempt to convert you. This isn’t the place for that. I’m just clarifying my reasons for disagreeing with you, and originally, with the author of the above article. I suspect I might have saved myself some time had I stated these things at the outset. My reasons for disagreeing are as follows: First, I don’t see how any system that encourages people to be better than they are, even if such a system uses threats of eternal damnation for failure to make the effort, are a bad thing in and of themselves. Religions, like most things we humans play with, are not dangers in and of themselves. Religions, at least at their beginnings, all have (or had) the intention of inspiring people to look above and beyond themselves. To realize that we are smaller than we think, and stronger than we imagine. To dream big impossible dreams. To have hope. Many people who become scientists get into science because they have done these things, or want to, or if not that, they at least aspire to understand a little more clearly the universe they live in. I don’t see science as very seperate from God and religion at all. Second, I find it hard to accept the belief that God is not relevant to science when an overwhelming number of scientists, particularly in the fields of quantum physics and astrophysics, claim belief in a higher power of some type. They may disagree as to what to call it, or even with the idea that any current human religion has the right of it, but that is kind of a side issue I would think. Finally, I think you may have a misunderstanding of what the purpose of faith is. It’s not a way to ‘understand the world around us’ as you put it. It is accepting the world as it is and accepting that it doesn’t have to make sense to you or be understood by you, and that no matter how ridiculous it seems, all things work out for the best, even if you disagree or dislike the way it turns out because in the end it isn’t about just you. And I would like to remind you that, as cliched as it’s become, the truth is that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. Maybe we haven’t found proof of a soul yet, or of God for that matter, but since we have no direct evidence to the contrary, neither can we assume that these things do not exist. So far all evidence to the contrary seems to me to be inferred by people, and most often by people who are not even open to the idea that such things could exist to begin with. Personally, I’d love to see some direct proof in EITHER direction just so people would quit arguing over the whole thing. Ultimately, my argument goes back to my original statement that, at least at present, I see no reason why belief in God and belief in science are treated as mutually exclusive options when there is more than enough room for both.
There are two main problems with religion:
1. It is wrong
2. It makes faith a virtue and faith is believing things without any evidence in their support. Faith therefore directly leads to people living in disconnect with the world they live in because their foundational beliefs about it are wrong. This can become self-destructive if people’s behavior determined by their belief in something that is out of touch with the reality they live in gets too out of line with what their behavior should be if they were firmly grounded in that reality. It has in fact become so – there is a quite high likelihood there won’t be any humans on this planet 100 years from now and the major reasons for that are faith and religion and how they have shaped people’s thinking.
Does religion provide purpose, meaning and inspiration to people? Yes, it does so. But the fact that it is wrong alone outweighs such benefits, and its negative consequences dwarf them.
That’s simply not true – the majority of theoretical physicists and cosmologists are atheists. Where did you get that idea from?
Faith is not “accepting the world as it is”, it is belief in things without any evidence to back them up. That’s by definition exactly the contrary to accepting the world as it is. Miracles and divine intervention exist only in the holy books, not in the world we live in.
Well, yes, but you do need a reason to believe in something. There isn’t anything in the world to suggest that Gods and souls exist, the only reason we take such a hypothesis seriously is that it has dominated the thinking of humanity for most of its existence during which people were too ignorant to think of anything better to explain the world around them.
I personally happen to be one of the few people on this planet that has been raised without any exposure to the concept of God until quite into my childhood (I was never told there is no God either, it just was never discussed) and in the same time I had already learned a good amount about the standard cosmological model of modern science (Big Bang + evolution, etc.) by the moment I was confronted with it. And when I first encountered the idea of God, I just laughed at how ridiculous it was. I am ready to bet that most of us would have done the same had they been raised without the pervasive influence of religion of almost every aspect of our culture and already knew the basic facts when they were first presented with the concept.
Atheists do not reject the possibility that God exists, they just think it is too small to be taken seriously and science does not reject the existence of God, it just sees no need for it as an explanatory mechanisms because materialistic explanations have not only been more that sufficient so far, but the more we learn, the less room remains for God to hide in.
Again:
1. There simply isn’t any need to invoke the existence of Gods and souls
2. There is an awful lot of stuff to explain if they do exist
That’s the reason why we reject them as explanations for anything. We do not reject the possibility that they exist, but we can not take them seriously. This is also the reason why science and belief in God are incompatible – the existence of God is a hypothesis that is not supported by any evidence (while there is tons of evidence that we just made it up); it goes directly against the core foundations of scientific thinking for someone to believe 100% in that hypothesis.
God is not mutually exclusive with science if God actually existed and there was evidence for that. Then science would happily accept his existence and would have to incorporate him in its cosmological model. But there is no evidence so belief in him is at present incompatible with being a good scientist (yes, there are a lot of highly accomplished scientists who believe in God, and yes, they are not good scientists). What is completely incompatible with science is faith, i.e. the belief in things that are not supported or rejected by evidence.
Re: “Abortion would have murdered me”
@psmith: There is “potential” (i.e. randomness) and room for making choices, only going forward in time. Once a person is born, the path that led to her existence is fixed. In probability language, conditional on you being around, any chance is completely eliminated from your history: you are here one hundred percent, and it is the fact rather than a possibility. There is no randomness in it, and the two following statements are completely equivalent:
“If she had aborted that foetus she would have murdered me” <- (the quote from you)
"If she haven't had sex with a serviceman going off to war she would have murdered me".
Jumping in without reading all the previous comments: Two points
1) The rights of viable individual organisms capable of thought, decision, and action always supersede and consideration due to non independently viable parasitic organisms. With that said, if @psmith’s parents had aborted him/her the world wouldn’t care, there are 7 billion people on the planet, I guarantee you the next generation will not have a deficit of warm bodies each with the same statistically relevant potential to better or worsen the world they have been born into. I.e. there is nothing significant about the individual, the individual is unique like all other individuals.
2) Religious beliefs, wants, desires, pressures will be tolerated within a democracy until such a point as those wants begin to conflict with the right of all other members of the society to do what they will with their own life. That means as far a a truly secular democracy is concerned churches should be just as responsible for the contraceptive needs of their employees as a secular organization. To illustrate, my right to choose chocolate ice cream does not extend to my right to deny you or anyone else the choice of vanilla or no ice cream at all. With that said, if the state requires that employers provide health care they don’t mean some health care, they mean all health care. If we give churches the right to deny this kind of health care what is to stop them from refusing to pay for vaccinations? What about Christian Science organizations, do they have to provide health care at all?
I personally think that we give religious organizations far too much latitude within our country, they already have tax-exempt status, can’t they just leave the sane world alone?
Lastly, I can understand the issue around a womans right to choose being about control over her body but what about a mans right to choose not to have a kid? I kinda think there should be an opt out option where if a man officially requests the termination of a pregnancy and the woman refuses his duty to that fetus should be eliminated, she can keep the kid but the kid shouldn’t work as a handcuff for the individual who was denied a choice in the matter.
@David C.R. wrote: “Both of you state that science says that souls do not exist. My question is this: How do you figure?”
How does science figure there aren’t exactly 12 gremlins inside of a human head?
Exactly 12 gremlins or the soul, both possibilities have about the same likelihood, given the evidence. It is possible that there are 12 gremlins inside of my head, but the probability is nearly zero. Quite similarly, according to science, souls “don’t exist”, i.e. they’re possible, but just as unlikely.
@David C.R. wrote: “EVERY previously held notion MUST be accepted or else science is a waste”
Well, here is a notion: EXACTLY 12 gremlins, not 11 or 13. Please disprove. What happens is that since possibilities of what is possible are endless, the probability for each of them is close to zero, when evenly divided. There is no evidence for either gremlins or souls, and therefore there is no data update for the prior belief.
interesting discussion: the trend is lets get rid of religion, let’s get rid of morals – well, religion is a long standing institution tasked to promote survival of life (some religion even speak of eternal life, i.e. survival of the species) – non religious behavior tends to be disorganized, risky and wasteful.
“morals” refer to acting (not as a follower but as an indepentent agent) based on the highest cognitive life- celebrating ability.
some day we might have mastered “life” well enough (eternal life?) that we might not need religion any longer……until then….
I suspect all the heat being generated here does speak to the values clash that Sean addressed in the OP.
One thing I have not seen addressed is that outcomes matter.
While I have a certain intellectual admiration for those who take purist positions (all death is wrong & murder, versus let’s say, life is pain and death merely a part of life, etc.), there is the issue of the outcomes. The purist positions on abortion generally lead to logical outcomes that are distasteful to most and horrifying to many.
Thus our societies tend to move to, not a moral centrist position, but an arbitrary one. Set a dividing line and state openly that you’ve done so. This of course does not satisfy the purists from any camp. However I think that is what we have done.
The funny thing is that abortion itself is distinctly distasteful. There aren’t too many people going around with messages like ‘abortion: A great way to spend a Saturday!’ It sounds wrong even as I write it.
Wait a minute. Are there actual Roman Catholic laity who own businesses and feel that they would disobey God if their corporate insurance pays for birth control? I thought only a bishop would care about that? : -)
I am with those who think that the difference between what we call a living entity and what we call a material object is a difference of degree, not of kind. The living have the same elements as the non-living, or as astrophysicists like to remind us, the heavy metals in your body were birthed in supernovae millions or even billions of years ago. We are, as a matter of easily provable, indisputable fact, star stuff. The elements are the same. The atomic weights are the same. The effects of the four known forces of nature upon us are the same.
I have heard it said, concerning the existence of miracles, either there is no such thing as a miracle, or everything which has ever or will ever exist is a miracle. Either existence itself is a miracle, or there are no miracles. The middle ground cannot ever be self-consistent.
I could be with the atheists and state there is no such thing as soul, but truth be told, I can equally see the animist viewpoint that EVERYTHING, rocks, dust and all the rest are nothing but spirit.
If the concept of quantum fluctuation – the idea that something, can indeed arise out of nothing because the quantum field is itself unstable, is true, then it will be the case that everything that can possibly exist has, does, or will exist, and that the nature of it all is truly emptiness.
If this line of thought corresponds to reality, then I must see each and every one of us as infinite beings (that is, expressions of infinity in an existence where all possibilities must exist) and whose true nature is, at the same time, emptiness.
That’s pretty much how I see it, actually.